MirrorDash

A calm display for your hallway mirror: the time, the weather and your day, glowing through the glass. No touchscreen, no voice assistant, no notifications.

From SD card to mirror in three steps

1. Flash the MirrorDash image onto an SD card and put it in the Pi.
2. Join the mirror's own Wi-Fi with your phone (scan the QR code on the screen) and pick your home network.
3. Done. Open mirrordash.local on your phone to choose what the mirror shows.

No keyboard, no terminal, no config files, now or later.

Why it's different from the smart mirror you built last time

Get started

You need

• A Raspberry Pi 3 or newer (MirrorDash is developed and tested on a Pi 3 B).
• An SD card of at least 8 GB.
• The official power supply (5.1 V, 2.5 A for a Pi 3). A weaker one makes the mirror slow, and it warns you.
• A screen behind a two-way mirror.

Then

1. Download the latest image (mirrordash-os-….img.xz) from Releases: the newest release whose name ends in -os1, -os2, ….
2. Flash it with Raspberry Pi Imager (Choose OS → Use custom).
3. Start the mirror. On its first start it restarts once by itself, then shows the Wi-Fi setup. The user guide takes it from there.

Modules

The clock comes with the mirror. Install the others in the admin page under Modules → Discover New Modules.

Make your own

uvx mirrordash-sdk quickstart mirrordash-my-widget

This creates a module with example data and starts a mirror on your computer that shows every change as you save. Put the module on GitHub as mirrordash-<something> and publish a GitHub Release: it then shows up in every mirror's Discover list. The SDK and its module guide have the details.

Under the hood

• Server: FastAPI (Python 3.14). Modules push their content to the screen over a WebSocket, and a page that reconnects gets everything again right away.
• Screen: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript without a build step, shown full screen by Cog (WPE WebKit) on labwc. Every mirror has its component library at /design.
• Modules: each is its own Python package, found through entry points. A module that crashes is restarted on its own.
• System: Raspberry Pi OS (Debian 13) with a read-only root (overlayroot). Settings, modules and Wi-Fi live on a separate partition. Updates go into a second environment, and the mirror switches back if the new one doesn't start.

Documentation

• User guide: setting up, wiring, the screen's rules, recovery, the API and Home Assistant.
• Changelog: what's new in each release.
• Contributing: run and change the core on your computer.
• Architecture and Design system: why it's built and looks the way it does.
• Releasing: how the OS image is built and released.

License

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0: free to use and change for personal, non-commercial use.